


waiting rooms

by dimpleforyourthoughts



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Gen, Mostly Gen, also clintasha if you squint super sUPER HARD, but stevebucky if you squint really hard, hella angst, i no longer know what has happened ive lost control of my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 13:17:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1746035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimpleforyourthoughts/pseuds/dimpleforyourthoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do a memory transference, Nat,” she mutters sarcastically under her breath, glaring at Steve through haunted eyes, “Replicate all my memories of Bucky and share them with him, Nat. It’ll only hurt a little, Nat. I can handle it, Nat.”</p><p>“You’re a goddamn liar.” She tells the sleeping body on the hospital bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	waiting rooms

**Author's Note:**

> My first foot forward into the Marvel fandom, written strictly because Katie is an enabler who manages to provoke the sadist in me.

 

Bucky wakes up almost immediately after the surgery. Steve…doesn’t.

It’s Natasha’s fifth cup of coffee and she doesn’t plan on stopping now.

The team is out in the waiting room; Bruce is pouring over the blueprints of the machinery with Tony ( _We did everything right Stark, so why isn’t he waking up_?), Sam is taking Bucky for a walk ( _I could use the fresh air man, and you can tell me all about Brooklyn_ ), Thor went off to go get food reinforcements from the rite-aid down the street ( _I shall get those Cracker Jacks that Captain Rogers likes, for when he wakes up_ ), and Clint is watching the door, like always (he doesn’t say anything to Natasha—she feels the gratitude for that down to her bones).

Everyone is useful in some roundabout way to the whole situation, but Natasha is not. Natasha can’t afford to be.

“Do a memory transference, Nat,” she mutters sarcastically under her breath, glaring at Steve through haunted eyes, “Replicate all my memories of Bucky and share them with him, Nat. It’ll only hurt a little, Nat. I can handle it, Nat.”

It had been days since the procedure, and she didn’t classify sleeping for that entire time as being able to ‘handle it’.

“You’re a goddamn liar.” She tells the sleeping body on the hospital bed.

She has never been good in situations like these, because Natasha Romanov does not stick around waiting to see if bodies die or live, for up until recently they have always been just bodies, assignments, missions. She knows her aim is true and that people die and there is no reason to wait around to watch that happen. She is not good at sitting around a hospital because she has never done it before, because she has never felt the simultaneous gut clench of fear and hope, has never truly balanced herself on such a tight rope. Even when Fury ‘died’ it had been all too fast for her to really feel the restlessness of waiting. She’s not good at this, at sharing blank rooms with other people who have the same feeling as her. She is not good at communing and she is not good at patience.

Natasha is learning more and more often that she is not good at many things that are human in nature.

Which was why she had shunted off Bucky Barnes into Sam’s knowing hands when he had woken, panicked and crying because  _I knew him, I know him, Where is he where is he_  had come flying out of Barnes’ mouth like grenades, and he was rattling off memories and shaking and gripping Natasha’s wrist so hard the bones ground together. It wasn’t until Sam stepped in, the smooth timbre of his voice softly telling Bucky to release Natasha that Steve was fine, that he was sleeping, that Bucky had even begun to calm down.

She hadn’t known what to do with the man with the metal arm in front of her, simply because defense was the only method she’d ever known when it came to the Winter Soldier. But this man—with wide and panicked eyes, sucking in air like he hadn’t breathed since falling from a train in 1944 – this man was not the Winter Soldier. So Sam had taken over, as Sam did with most messes that Natasha knew nothing about how to clean up.

The coffee has cooled in her hands, she drinks it anyhow.

She looks at Captain America and thinks half heartedly of silver linings. That’s Steve’s thing, it always has been, finding light in all things dark, and when she looks at the heart monitor beeping steadily, the charts on the bedside table, she knows that by all medical measurements Steve Rogers is in perfect health. He’d been certain the memory transfer would work, insistent of Doctor Banner’s diagnostic of the equipment, reversing of the memory wipe. But it was also an eight hour surgery on a man who’d been wiped countless times, they hadn’t been sure Bucky would make it, and if he did, that he would make it out with a single memory.

He had woken up rattling off memories of Steve and the war like they’d happened yesterday, though, so maybe there was a silver lining after all.

“They didn’t tell me the nurses were so beautiful these days.” Steve rasps.

It takes her entire focus to keep from bolting out of her seat and flying at him. She’s halfway successful, rising from her chair and walking over at a neutral pace, maintaining her smile to a simple wry curve of lips.

“Thought you were too busy for dating.”

Steve raises his wrist, wrapped in IVs and monitors. “Apparently I am. Hi Nat.”

And Natasha Romanov is not in love with Steve Rogers, but she does love him, feels it sudden and violent and fiercely protective, can feel all the ways it makes her vulnerable. She feels parts of her mask breaking apart, hard clay soaked too long in water.

“Hi Steve.”

“So,” He shifts slightly on the hospital bed, groaning and then reaching up to pat the gauze wrapped around his head, “What’s the diagnostic this time? Alien bopped me on the head? Did I sink another plane into the ocean and sleep for seventy years? Or did someone give Thor Red Bull before sparring again?”

“The memory transfer was successful.” She says, leaning forward, hands fretful at the sweat on Steve’s brow, checking all the monitors and charts just to know everything is still okay, checking his pulse, warm and insistent under the tips of her fingers. “We were worried you wouldn’t make it. The surgery was tricky…but you were right, after all—“ she cuts off, because she can mother hen over Steve any damn time she pleases, and there are other people to whom it is more important to see Steve alive, “He woke up just a few hours after, wouldn’t shut up about you. Stevie this, Stevie that…had to get Sam to take him off my hands just so I’d be sure you’d get your rest. But I digress. You probably want to see him, let me call Sam--”

“See who?”

Natasha flicks her eyes over the drug dosage reading on the IV: light, barely enough to sedate a man, certainly not enough to conk out a Supersoldier. She frowns.

“Bucky, of course.”

A few days ago Tony had asked--jokingly, ironically, in a way that only Tony Stark can get away with--which is worse: Bucky Barnes not remembering Bucky Barnes, or Bucky Barnes not remembering Steve Rogers?

“It’s a trick question.” He’d said conspiratorially. “There is no Bucky Barnes without Steve Rogers anyhow.”

Natasha couldn’t help wondering if the inverse was true as well.

She knows when Steve’s brow creases, that she’s dealt with worse than this. She has seen men bleed out, the light fade from their eyes, she has felt worse pains and she has caused worse pains than this. She has done all that and she survived. And if Natasha has, then so will Bucky Barnes.

He will be prepared, he will endure this, she thinks.

She hopes.

She isn’t sure.

And she also knows, as Steve straightens in the bed linens, looking stiff and confused, that something is horribly wrong. That there is a spark in Steve Rogers’ eyes that is missing, some innate sense of happiness once present now lost, because he was a kid from Brooklyn who got beat up in alleyways and lost everyone he’d ever loved before going off to war, but had a best friend with him till the end of the line.

Subtract the best friend, take away Bucky Barnes, and you have a boy who got beat up in alleyways his whole life, who watched his parents die, who lived by himself, who went off to war and fought, alone.

The spark of warmth that speaks to a lifetime of companionship rather than misery is gone. It’s a modern day horror story and she knows without inquiring that Tony’s trick question goes both ways, absolutely.

“Nat...”

Steve squints at her, and Natasha knows with certainty that she is never—not in a million years and a million red ledgers and a million saved memories for a million best friends--going to forgive herself.

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> dimpleforyourthoughts: [tumblr](http://dimpleforyourthoughts.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/dimpled_trash)  
> /[ko-fi account](http://ko-fi.com/A33648QC)  
> 


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